Bicycle Love: Stories of Passion, Joy, and Sweat

by Garth Battista (Editor)

Overview

All athletes love their sports, but cycling has a fetishistic side to it—the love of this deceptively simple machine that allows you to silently float, race and climb. These 50 essays on the many varieties of bicycle love range from dreamy reminiscences of childhood bikes to powerful, sometimes insane adult attachments to mountain bikes, road bikes and tandems. They all celebrate the freedom of cycling, the elegance of the machine and the beauty of the act. The characters are everyone from a teenage girl on a moun-tain bike to old men crossing the country on touring bikes to couples falling in love while cycling. Funny, revealing and intensely emotional, these stories show the secret inner life of every cyclist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781891369452
Publisher:	Breakaway Books
Publication date:	05/01/2004
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Garth Battista is the editor of The Runner's Literary Companion and How Running Changed My Life.

Table of Contents

	Surprised into Flight	9
	Pedaling Fool	13
	Scratching the Surface	19
	Crash and Learn	23
	The Perfect Bike	27
	Morning Revolutions	29
	Streetpulse; or, How I Learned to Stop Taking the Bus and Love Bike Commuting	33
	To Africa and Back	37
	Callie's Gift	41
	Full Cycle with Spin	47
	Another Way of Getting There; or, How My Bicycle Became My Lover After Many Years of Servitude and Neglect	53
	Wanted: Young Bike, for Adventure, Escape, and ... Who Knows?	59
	The Mountain Bike Club We Started	65
	Loving My Rockhopper	69
	Heaven Is a Wide Berm and a Tailwind	73
	Haleakala High	77
	Break Up	83
	Riding to Freedom	89
	The Unbearable Lightness of Biking	95
	Riding for Nefertiti	101
	Mas Fina	107
	It's About Freedom	111
	An Old Bike and an Even Older Man	115
	If All the Traffic Were Bicycles	119
	Into the Wind	125
	Pedaling in Tandem	129
	Traveling in Tandem	133
	Go Hard or Go Home	139
	The Lady of the Ditch	145
	Lazarus	149
	A Return to Freedom	153
	Lessons from the Great Divide	157
	Saddlemasochism	163
	Bike-Speed	167
	Life Is Short but an Ugly Bike Is Forever	173
	One if by Land, Two if by Sea, and Nine if You're Like Me ...	177
	Bicycle Bliss	183
	War Bike	187
	Ma Kettle Biker	193
	Kneeling at the Altar of Schwinn, 1966	199
	The Downhill Stretch: An Elegy	205
	Pedaling Pregnant	209
	"Who Wants to Marry a Bicyclionaire?" or, Bicycling in Search of the Erotic in an Ekpyrotic Universe	213
	The Secrets of the Love Affair	221
	If Ever There Were Warriors...	223
	A Rusty Old Memory	229
	Leaving the Sport You Love	233
	Running with the Big Dogs	239
	The Face of the High Desert	245
	Did Someone Mention Bicycles?	249
	The Revolution Evolution	253
	It's Not About the Bike	257
	The Inside Spin	261
	The Yellow Huffy	267
	Phat	271
	Dalton Highway	275
	The Great Bicycle Experiment	281
	The Life of an Inspired Cyclist	287
	Bicycle or Boyfriend	291
	Medical Experience	299
	Bicycle (Carriage) Built for Two	303
	Loving a Cyclist	307